Trust and obfuscation principles for quality of information in emerging pervasive environments

Abstract

The emergence of large scale, distributed, sensor-enabled, machine-to-machine pervasive applications necessitates engaging with providers of information on demand to collect the information, of varying quality levels, to be used to infer about the state of the world and decide actions in response. In these highly fluid operational environments, involving information providers and consumers of various degrees of trust and intentions, obfuscation of information is used to protect providers from misuses of the information they share, while still providing benefits to their information consumers. In this paper, we develop the initial principles for relating to trust and obfuscation within the context of this emerging breed of applications. We start by extending the definitions of trust and obfuscation into this emerging application space. We, then, highlight their role as we move from tightly-coupled to loosely-coupled sensory-inference systems. Finally, we present the interplay between trust and obfuscation as well as the implications for reasoning under obfuscation. © 2012 IEEE.